Re-Energizing LoCo Teams

I believe that in the entire history of Ubuntu we are at the most exciting time we have ever experienced.

With Ubuntu we set out with a clear mission: to build an elegant, beautiful, Free Software platform that brings powerful, easily accessible, technology to all. We are gritted in our determination around this mission.

All the pieces are starting to come together. A powerful converged platform, a beautiful user experience, a new SDK and app upload process, powerful cloud orchestration technologies, and a growing eco-system of users, app developers, and devops.

Awesome technology is not enough though. Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of many great technologies that didn’t catch on. The key to successful, living, breathing technology is adoption and passionate users and developers.

Building Adoption

LoCo Teams are a critical piece of how we drive this adoption.

LoCo teams are our front-line troops out there living Ubuntu and sharing it with others. If we have successful LoCo teams we will have a successful Ubuntu.

In recent years we have faced some challenges with LoCo Teams though. Fewer people have been participating in teams, we have some rather bureaucratic processes in place for how and where people can form teams, and LoCo teams are not as optimized for success as they could be. Put simple, I feel our LoCo Team community could benefit from stronger and more visible leadership.

I want to change this. I want to re-energize our LoCo community to bring out the best in our wider community and to open doors to more and more people who can be touched by Ubuntu. I am not talking about just welcoming Linux fans to LoCo teams…but app developers, content creators, devops, partners, general users, and more.

The potential is tantalizing.

For us to achieve this though we need a crisp strategy.

At UDS the other day we had a session that I found personally rather frustrating. At every UDS we always have a session about LoCo Teams, and there are always lots of ideas around what LoCo teams should be doing and how we can support them. These ideas are usually expressed as “we should do XYZ” or “the problem with LoCo teams is XYZ and we need to fix that“. We always have lots of ideas but few people are willing to sign up to work items to deliver that work.

Ideas are easy to have, delivering real practical solutions that drive improvements is harder, and we need more of the latter. We need people who are willing to make change happen in a practical way.

There is too much opportunity with Ubuntu and bringing technology freedom to people to let our LoCo Teams wither on the vine.

I want to transition the mental model of how the LoCo Council works from merely joining meetings and reacting to agenda items and tending to the business of the week. I want to see the council bring leadership, challenge the norms, challenge our bottlenecks, and build a culture of innovation and change around our LoCo Teams.

Our community is laden with great people who can bring this kind of leadership, and I want to encourage you to join the council.

We need people who are willing to commit more than providing +1 and -1 votes on our LoCo Council meetings, but people who want to think about the next generation of LoCo Teams and what work needs to be completed to achieve that vision, and commit to driving it forward. I would ask that only those of you willing to (a) lead and (b) commit time to actively participate in the strategy the council focuses on should apply. If you can only commit to joining the LoCo Council meetings and not driving strategy and leadership forward, please don’t apply to join.

This is not to suggest our existing and previous LoCo Councils has and have not been doing great work; I am tremendously thankful for their remarkable contributions. I just think we need to amp up our game, in much of the same way we have been amping up the Ubuntu platform. Now is our opportunity and we need to grasp it with both hands.

This is a tremendous opportunity for great leaders to have a real world-changing impact on Ubuntu and Free Software in general.

If you are excited about the opportunity of re-energizing LoCo Teams, bringing leadership, and challenging the norm, I strongly encourage you to apply. Please share your ideas for leadership and change in your application.

I am doggedly committed to helping to make our LoCo Teams successful and I have some ideas around how we do this when the new council is formed. I am looking forward to working with our new generation of leaders to help our LoCo Teams to do incredible world-changing work with an incredible world-changing platform.

4 Comments

Lucas
on August 31, 2013 at 6:34 pm

“we have some rather bureaucratic processes in place for how and where people can form teams”

First step: Stop the need for an approval.
Our LoCo (which changed more to a Linux group in general) will just stop spreading Ubuntu CD and focus on other distros if you don’t send them to us because we aren’t approved. Easy as that.
I don’t see why we should do extra work to get approved if we do free marketing for Ubuntu.

Thanks for the article. I, too, am excited about an opportunity to contribute to my regional LoCo team. It seems the team in my region is inactive and being relatively new to Ubuntu I am not quite sure how to get it going again or where to turn. Unfortunate really because I see Ubuntu’s potential as, well, huge.